Drive your car, save the planet

IMO cost accounting is a black art to begin with. It always seems like the numbers point to the conclusion that was desired before the calculations. There are always factors that are left out or imputed or ...

That makes me wonder. Did this guy want to conclude that walking was worse for the environment?

and might avoid a screaming (pedal to the metal) ambulance trip to ER or a premature caravan that's led by a hearse. And don't forget the wake with all that consumption of meat and spirits. Think of the CO2 that creates.

than when you're dead (depending on body disposal method of course).

... I recently saw on TV. It was one of those anti-smoking commercials that mentioned a study funded by the tobacco industry in the 70's or 80's. The characters in the commercial were talking to a dairy farmer and asked him if he had seen the tobacco study that "proved" that milk was more of a cancer causing threat than second hand smoke.

I suspect the milk being studied was from cows that had been down wind at Chernobyl.

Truth.com?

I only saw it once, as I was washing dishes the other night, while watching the news.

If it had girls in bikinis, I would have paid more attention.

...I've heard that it has been recommended to limit both use of a personal vehicle and having children.

personally - I think there's a more constructive solution than suicide...it is important to be inspired/compelled to search for it...

I tried to convince my wife that we shouldn't have any, but she didn't buy it. Still, that's just a stopgap. It doesn't address the problem adequately.

I still say that for true believers in the "green" philosophy suicide is the only option.

Once a kid reaches 4 feet tall they start to produce too much carbon. We just need to make our race more compact.

Stunting their growth would be one solution but I propose another that would get rid of the beef production problem that was the fundamental issue in DM's study. Let us just resort to cannibalism. As a child grows past 4 feet, we just whittle away the excess and use the meat to replace the beef. That way we reduce the amount of carbon emissions by humans and reduce the emissions produced by raising beef for food as well.

This is just a modest proposal but I believe further scientific studies along the lines of the one DM quoted will prove the truth in it.

Does this Modest Proposal cover just Irish kids, or everybody? Hmmm...Jonathan Swift - coincidence or a plot by the meat packing industry. Joking, of course.

... we could always ask each of us to give up one buttock in order to stave off the siege of the environment by the Beef industry.

This plan would make for the best... of all possible worlds.

Finally! After all the time I've spent on an OR having doctors carve out parts of me, I'm one of the early members of a movement (grin!)

You missed the obvious joke setup - your boss, your wife, the IRS (or whatever you can stick into the blank) chewing your rear end off (grin).

...about cannibalism and I missed the obvious. I thought pulling out Voltaire was pretty good though.

It's been too long since I read Robinson Caruso to think of a set up from him. Wasn't there a cannibalism situation in Treasure Island as well?

You made a Pearl Buck reference a few weeks ago but I had to look it up since I never read The Good Earth. That was about famine in China, right? Any rib nibbling in that book?

This all just reminds me that I need to brush up on some of my reading, including some of the old standards.

I'd have to re-read Robinson Crusoe again to work up something. All I could come up off the top of my head would be the thought, Did Friday eat soylent green on Tuesday? A stinker of a joke.
On The Good Earth, AIR there were references to rumors of human flesh bringing a price in the marketplace during famines. That book had a famine as part of the story, but I always looked on it as a story about Wang Lung's obsession with his land. I can relate to that. That must have been obvious to some of my friends, as after I bought the farm they nicknamed me "Wang Lung the Farmer". Well, after they got over a classic misunderstanding after I phoned in to work from the closing, told the boss the sale was finalized, and he in all innocence went to the lunch room and announced, Just wanted to let everybody know, Vega just bought the farm!" Needless to say, half of the room took it the wrong way.

limiting growth. Maybe it's just my imagination but it seems today's kids are larger than when I was a teen. We had very few males over 6' when I was in HS back in the '60s. I don't think we had any girls above about 5'10. I've seen 8th and 9th graders over 6' these days. Maybe I grew up in a town full of shrimps. If it's true, I wonder why. Is is just better nutrition or could it be all the growth hormones that slip into our food sources?

Nutrition is one thing when it comes to growth and development. How much of an effect does it have on sexual maturity? I have seen anecdotal comments more and more often, talking about girls getting their menstruation at a younger age than ever before. If this is true, then is it nutrition or some artificial component of the food supply?

Any doctors want to chime in on this?

I also have to wonder if it's something psychological that can stimulate girls and maybe even boys. How about the constant pounding they get to dress and act like "adults"...and I use adults loosely because it comes mostly from the entertainment industry. There's sex and sexual innuendo everywhere. Younger girls are wearing more revealing clothing when they have nothing to reveal. Teen girls get fashion help....and sometimes surgery....to make them more appealing. I have heard that some non-nursing women can be stimulated to produce milk without artificial hormones. Could it be that other hormones in young girls can be "forced" to produce in greater abundance by stimulations of the mind that increase fantasies or whatever?

... in this day and age, is nothing more than a marketing ploy. Encourage a kid to have adult expectations and you encourage a kid to spend their money earlier.

However, from what I understand, viewing a child's formative years as something special and separate from adult responsibilities is something relatively new and possible only in a fairly affluent society or family. If you look at classic paintings of several hundred years ago, children were usually depicted as small adults in their manner of dress. Pictures of royal courts would depict children as being dressedc just like the adults... was this a parody or more likely an accurate depiction of how young children were dressed? In poor families, children have often been put to work at a very early age simply because it was necessary.

Still, you raise an interesting issue as to what psychological stress and/or expectations can do to stimulate sexual maturity. Heck, children's toys help them to play act as adults at a very young age. Toy guns for boys... and baby dolls for girls... is the "acceptable" cultural norm (reverse the toy of choice and the child is looked at as something odd by many adults).

As for stimulating the mind? Look at the physical feats of Tibetan monks who can raise their body temperature through meditation, a martial artist who can turn flesh to steel, or a long distance runner who has worked themselves into a runners high... all situations that would be called "mind over matter" situations. It would be interesting for a sociologist or psychologist to study what you have pondered, the question of social expectations influencing physical, sexual maturity.

Teachers and school councilors may be more aware of this subject. It would be interesting to hear from them about this subject.

"the question of social expectations influencing physical, sexual maturity." is akin to a giraffe having a long neck from stretching to reach higher.

He was the one who suggested it and I said it was an interesting thought. Your thoughts on this subject is why do Giraffes have long necks?

So they can play polo without a polo mallet?

as the quote clearly came from your post and I replied to your post.

Sexual maturity is tied to a bunch of triggers that AFAIK are poorly understood. Physical size may enter into the equation, but body composition (fat cells, ...) are believed to be related to sexual maturation in girls. I haven't seen as much information about boys.

It is possible that if children are bigger than they used to be these triggers would 'kick in' at younger ages because of the larger bodies of the kids but I don't know enough to speculate further.

And also, for many generations, humans (for most of the western culture) have not gone through the normal feast/famine cycles of the caveman days and what not. I don't think growth hormones in our food has had an effect, but it may.

Along that line, a few days ago I was checking a law book dated 1775 that was printed in London. Bear in mind, in 1775 what is now the U.S. was under their rule.
Looking for the laws about Popery, I opened the book and it happened to open at the laws about rape. Under the main heading of "What it Is" item 2 said:
"Also, if any person shall unlawfully and carnally know, and abuse any woman child, under the age of ten years, and whether with her consent or against it: he shall be guilty of felony without benefit of clergy".
Would that mean that in 1775 the age of consent was 10 years old? If so, that's a surprising little bit of historical trivia in my opinion.

The continuing decrease in age of menarche in the West is AFAIK now definitely attributable to nutrition and pediatric health care. That doesn't mean girls have sex earlier, just that they're able to reproduce when they do. (Although neither MD's nor MSW's recommend that they have sex.)

Personal observation: My middle school girl students mostly show secondary sex characteristics, and seem sex-mad from their topics of conversation. But I believe that they're more talk than action. Of course the high school boys they meet are the opposite.

One study I read was from York, England, where some church records survived many wars and upheavals. They show that marriages often were contracted among very young girls and boys. Not infants, as in India or the Far East, but many 12-year-olds. No doubt family arrangements, but age of consent would have to be presumed. That doesn't mean they reproduced successfully at that age. (This is back to Cromwellian times, if not earlier.)

I believe the growth hormone issue is still undecided by heavier researchers than we have here on SE, but I suppose that won't stop us ...

I'd have to think that pediatric care would (or should) only help those who develop later than normal. I'd have to hope that pediatric care, by design, doesn't attempt to lower the age of menarche and that any statistics just show a change in mean age overall and not the affect on normally developing young girls.